The green economy is hungry for copper, and people are stealing, battling, and dying to supply it. Copper has caused more devastation than any other metal, with the potential exception of gold. In the future years, we’ll require more of it than ever.
Moqadi Mokoena left his home in the suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa, to work as a security guard. His boss had assigned him to a squad guarding an electrical substation where four other guards had been stripped naked and assaulted with pipes by gun-wielding robbers just two days prior. On this day in May 2021, Mokoena and a colleague guard were at the substation, staring tensely through their truck’s windscreen as a gang of armed men approached.
Mokoena took out his phone and contacted his wife, the mother of his one-year-old daughter. He told her about the group approaching him. “I’m scared,” he added. He did not own a gun. “I think they are the same ones who attacked our colleagues.”
Minutes after, the soldiers began firing with at least one automatic rifle. Mokoena’s colleague rushed out of the truck but was killed by gunfire. A third guard ducked for cover, fired back at the criminals, and then rushed for rescue. When he returned with the supervisor, they discovered Mokoena and his buddy had died. Police later reported that the offenders stole around $1,600 worth of copper cable.
Power firms are generally a rather boring industry. However, they are being attacked in South Africa by heavily armed gangs, who have destroyed the country’s energy infrastructure and taken an increasing number of lives. Almost every day, thieves attack the material that transmits power, forcing hospitals to close, train lines to shut down, houses across the nation to go black, and water supplies to be cut off.
The growing middle class in Asia and the global south was expected to adopt more sophisticated energy and electronics on a never-before-seen scale, prompting experts in and around the mining sector to forecast an explosion in copper demand at least as early as the early 2000s. Despite China’s fast urbanisation, efficiency in the use of copper, achieved by the miniaturisation of electronics and the switch from wired to wireless telephone and data transmission, somewhat prevented the predicted demand. Twenty years later, nevertheless, it appears that a revolutionary change in the demand for copper around the world is imminent.
Renewable energy sources’ higher copper intensity is just one factor. Many analysts predict that by 2035, copper consumption will nearly double to about 50 million tonnes annually due to the speed at which the transition must occur to meet 2030 and 2050 commitments regarding the replacement of coal and gas generation capacity and the phase-out of oil for automobiles. Sadly, the supply of copper isn’t keeping up. Over the next ten years, copper production from ongoing mining operations is predicted to decrease; in the absence of replacement projects, the total supply of copper from ongoing and planned operations is predicted to fall from current levels to about 19.6 Mtpa by 2030.
Of the 228 deposits found between 1990 and 2021, only one was found between 2018 and 2021, even though the US Geological Survey estimates that there are around 3.5 billion tonnes of discoverable copper out there. Understandably, environmental and other sustainability regulations are making it more difficult to get permits for new mining operations. Bringing new operations online takes an average of seven to ten years, assuming all goes according to plan.
WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL WITH COPPER?
“Electrify everything” is the rallying cry of proponents of the energy transition. Meaning: Instead of using fossil fuels to power automobiles, heating systems, industrial facilities, and all other machines, let’s use electricity. We need copper, plenty of it, to do that. Copper is the best natural electrical conductor on Earth, second only to silver, a much rarer and more costly metal. Electric cars, wind turbines, and solar panels all require it. (The average EV has up to 175 pounds of copper.) We require it for the enormous batteries that will supply electricity in the absence of the sun and wind. The innumerable miles of electrical lines that support the energy system in almost every nation must be greatly expanded and upgraded.
According to recent research from S&P Global, the total amount of copper that humanity will require over the next 25 years will surpass the total amount consumed throughout history. According to the paper, “the world has never produced anywhere near this much copper in such a short time frame.” The challenge may be too much for the planet. In the upcoming years, analysts estimate that supply will be millions of tonnes short. It is understandable why Goldman Sachs referred to copper as “the new oil” and stated that “no decarbonisation without copper” is possible.
The price of copper has also skyrocketed as the energy shift picks up speed. The cost of a tonne of copper has increased from roughly $6,400 to over $9,000 in the last four years. As a result, robbers now have easy access to electrical wiring, machinery, and even fresh metal from the mines. Numerous lives have been lost, and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the metal has been taken worldwide. No metal, possibly except gold, has wrought so much devastation and death.
Naturally, reputable businesses produce and sell the majority of the copper in the globe. However, even the legitimate copper business has caused a great deal of damage. Massive pits filled with poisonous waste and contaminated vast tracts of land and waterways have been left behind by copper mining in the western United States, South America, and central Africa. Since the majority of the world’s richest and most accessible copper reserves have already been extracted, the likelihood of more catastrophes is, in some respects, increasing. According to Canadian former mining engineer Scott Dunbar, “all the low-hanging fruit has been picked.” In many large mines, the quality of the remaining ore, or the proportion of metal in the rock, is rapidly declining. That means ever larger tracts of land have to be torn up to extract the same amount of copper, generating ever larger amounts of waste.
Central Africa represents the next frontier for copper. Since the early 2000s, investment has poured in to meet China’s expanding demand for raw commodities. The majority of the action takes place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a massive country two-thirds the size of Western Europe and rich in copper, diamonds, gold, cobalt, and other minerals. Mining generates around 80% of the country’s foreign profits. However, very little of this reaches the masses. Most Congolese survive on less than $3 per day.
The valuables produced by these mines attract some of the most audacious thieves. By the light of the full moon, robbers in Toyota Tundra pickup trucks pull up beside trains transporting copper slabs from the Atacama mines to the shore. With possibly a murmured prayer to the spirits of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the thieves climb atop the copper trains, sever the ropes holding the 180-pound slabs, drop them into the beds of the driving trucks, and vanish into the darkness.
No one knows exactly how much copper is stolen every year across the world. Thieves typically sell their wares to no-questions-asked scrapyards and recyclers, who strip off cable coatings and other nonmetallic materials and then shred or melt down the copper. Anyone can do it: The metal can be melted with blowtorches or small furnaces you can buy on Amazon. There are plenty of online videos that can walk you through the process. Once rendered into a generic form, stolen copper can be mixed with legally obtained metal. At that point, it’s easy to sell into the regular market; its origin is essentially impossible to trace.
However, it is realistic to assume that the amount taken each year is in the hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. In one especially brazen crime in 2023, approximately $200 million worth of copper and other metals were stolen from Aurubis, Europe’s largest manufacturer. In 2013, authorities cracked down on a group that stole up to $80 million in copper ingots from an Arizona mine. Prosecutors alleged that personnel involved in the operation would open the gates for trucks operated by their confederates, who would fill them with raw copper before driving right back out. The metal was sold to recyclers in California, who blackened it to seem like junk before shipping it to China.
A more effective response to the copper theft pandemic might be to shift the focus from supply to demand. It will not be easy. However, consider that there are over 1 billion automobiles on the world’s roadways; replacing each of them with an electric car would need vast amounts of copper to manufacture all of those cars, as well as the infrastructure to power them. Of course, if we expanded public transport, subsidised e-bikes, and created more walkable cities, we wouldn’t need as much copper. Whether or not we achieve those things, one thing is certain: we must make a historic transition to renewable energy. However, we must recognise that the carbon-free, solar-, and wind-powered future we long for poses its own set of risks to people and the environment.
Author- Amar Chowdhury
